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September heralds the six-month dolphin-hunting season in Taiji, a small seaside town in Japan's southwestern Wakayama prefecture. And residents are sensing the attack on them has also begun. The Cove - a U.S. documentary with the air of a spy thriller that has been called "advocacy filmmaking at its best" since its release on July 31 - depicts Taiji's centuries-old tradition of killing dolphins with an unflinching eye on the sometimes gruesome process. The documentarians, led by photographer turned director Louie Psihoyos and dolphin trainer turned activist Richard O'Barry, have stirred both international outcry and acclaim...
...accept a film, but TIFF's slogan of "Action! For Earth" raised more than a few eyebrows when the widely lauded eco-documentary didn't make the cut. In the end, Yoda said, the festival "decided to take The Cove due to international attention worldwide." (See pictures of Japan and the world...
...dramatic effect, The Cove casts Taiji's dolphin hunt as one town's dirty secret. The reality, however, is that Japan culls about 20,000 dolphins across the nation every year. To those in Taiji and other areas where dolphin hunting is permitted, the global reaction to The Cove has a whiff of the enduringly contentious whaling debate (Japan has hunted whales in the name of science for decades despite environmentalists' ire). The new wave of criticism of dolphin hunting that has been spurred by the film has many fishermen and local bureaucrats rolling their eyes over what they interpret...
...Meanwhile, the people of Taiji, pop. circa 3,400, believe they have been unfairly singled out. While Taiji has a 400-year history of whale and dolphin hunting, its fishermen catch less than 20% of Japan's yearly dolphin quota. Iwate prefecture catches the most of any area, bringing in a total of 11,070 dolphins in 2006 and 10,218 in 2007. But even those figures are well below the prefecture's legal limits, and Taiji fishermen also hunted about half their limit in 2006 and 2007, averaging about 1,430 dolphins a year. In response to The Cove...
China has replaced the U.S. as Japan's leading trading partner, and Hatoyama has said he would like Japan to develop more of an "equal" relationship with its American ally. That has raised concerns that the DPJ might tinker with some aspects of its security pact with the U.S. Such fears are probably unfounded; everyone in Japanese politics knows the alliance with the U.S. is the bedrock on which Japanese security rests. But as China grows in strength politically and economically, it is inevitable that any Japanese government will want to have close relations with Beijing as well as Washington...